Japan’s famous noodle dish has swept America by storm, with diners waiting hours to slurp a bowl of noodles, and we travel across the country to reveal this mania. The episode kicks off with a ramen tutorial from Sun Noodles, who custom makes noodles for most of America’s ramen chefs, including Ivan Orkin, the renegade New Yorker-turned-Japanese ramen chef who we visit later in the episode. Next, we visit seafood purveyor-turned-ramen chef Yuji Haraguchi as he creates a “New York” version of his broth-less ramen dish mazemen (with interpretations of classic NY deli food such as “bacon and eggs” or “bagels with lox”) using sustainable and typically discarded seafood from the nearby Whole Foods Market. Tummies full, we check out as the new Ivan Ramen restaurant to discusses ramen culture in NY vs Tokyo. The episode then travels to Berkeley, CA, as we tour the local greenmarket with 3 former Chez Panisse chefs who traveled to Japan to learn about its ramen culture and have returned to the US to create The Ramen Shop which serves a locally sourced, seasonal, and sustainable Meyer Lemon Shoyu Ramen that takes from Japan’s infamous ramen culture but creates something wholly local and personal.

The two largest Korean populations in the US are in New York and Los Angeles, and we visit both to check out what distinguishes each. Whereas NY’s Koreatown butts against the Empire State Building, and is essential one-block long, LA’s Koreatown merges with the city’s Latino community and is practically a city on to itself. Both are 24-hour hubs of food and drinking culture. At dinner with Lisa Ling and her husband Paul Song, the chef /owner of Parks BBQ breaks down the basics of Korean cooking. Back in NY, we tour Manhattan’s K-town with author of Koreatown USA, Matt Rodbard, and stop in at Pocha 32, for some watermelon soju and budaejjigae. Later in the episode, at Saveur Magazine’s test kitchen (which happens to be located in K-town), Top Chef Winner Kristen Kish, a Seoul-born Korean adoptee, is receiving her first-ever Korean cooking lesson with us. Her teacher is Maangchi, the Korean housewife who is now a Youtube sensation and one of the web’s most beloved cooking instructors, and together we learn how to make kimchi.

Andy Ricker, a Portland, OR-carpenter-turned chef, who has brought “authentic” Thai food to America, holds a welcome dinner for participating LUCKYRICE Festival chefs at Saipin Chutima's Lotus of Siam in Las Vegas. The duo work together to create their collective version of a Northern Laab, a typical Issan dish that is spicy, tasty drinking food in Chiang Mai. Jet Tila, who is at the table, rhapsodizes about the days when his family opened America’s first Thai grocery store in Hollywood, CA, and brought ingredients like lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves to the American palate. We check out this legendary market, and pay a tribute at a local LA Thai temple, as Jet Tila travels to NYC to participate in LUCKYRICE’s annual James Beard House dinner, which this year focuses on Thai New Year (Songkram) prepared by Chef Jet along with a bevy of other Thai chefs including Pichet Ong and Hong Thaimee.

Filipinos comprise the second largest Asian American population nationwide (and the largest in California), but whose cuisine is relatively unknown. We explore this phenomenon with PJ Quesada, whose grew up working in his grandparents’ Filipino food factory and is now founder of the Filipino Food Movement, as we feast at his buddy Tim Luym’s global-Filipino restaurant, Attic. In Los Angeles, we visit Kristine de la Cruz, who is introducing Filipino flavors like ube with her unusual bakery, Crème Caramel. Back in NY, we meet Nicole Ponseca, an advertising executive who left her Madison Ave life, and her husband Chef Miguel Trinadad, to give voice to Filipino culture through food; their restaurants, Maharlika and Jeepney, are now on every foodies’ “must-try” lists and we sit down to “Kamayan” with Chef Susur Lee. Food is a powerful way for Asian cultures to give voice to tradition, and we see a new generation that is embracing this loud and clear.

We visit the world headquarters for Google in the South Bay city of Mountain View and Apple in Cupertino. Olivia Wu designed the original Asian restaurant concepts, including the home-style “Jia”, one of the most popular restaurants on the Apple campus. Baadal is Google’s first “sit-down” restaurant, which happens to be Indian, as we participate in the assembly line process that churns out 2,000 servings of the Indian fried rice dish, “Biryani” on “Biryani Fridays”. Some of their purveyors include two retired Japanese semiconductor executives who have constructed an indoor, vertical farm called Ecopia, and seek to redefine farming culture in the midst of global warming, and Hodo Soy Beanery, making artisanal tofu products.

Chinese food in America has evolved over the generations. We visit the borders of Manhattan’s Chinatown, through the lens of two third-generation young Chinese American restaurateurs who have changed how Americans define Chinese cuisine. Wilson Tang, of Nom Wah Tea Parlor, has inherited his family’s dim sum parlor (America’s oldest) to preserve its legacy while opening up a fine-dining Chinese restaurant with Chef Jonathan Wu on Chinatown’s expanding Lower East Side Jewish immigrant neighborhood. We also get a Peking Duck tutorial from Ed Schoenfeld, a self-proclaimed Chinese food expert who grew up Jewish in Brooklyn, yet has opened one of the most critically acclaimed Chinese restaurants today in New York alongside chef Joe Ng. The episode closes at Hakkasan, a mega-brand for Chinese food which was birthed in London by Alan Yau and now spawns nightclubs in Las Vegas as well as restaurants from Beverly Hills to Dubai to Shanghai.